Delivering a Custom Report Export Template—No Code Needed

And if you continue to scroll on that page, you’ll see the different configuration options. And each one of these pages has exactly what you need to do without coding to make changes to this template, such as color codes, you just change the hex code, that’s all. Next, I’m going to show you exactly how to make those changes and then we’ll move into applying some style guides and what that report looks like at the end. I’ve gone ahead and downloaded the Single Scope generic template that you can find on this page right here, just this very first template. This would be used for if I’m only doing one specific scope in my Pen test. So if I’m only doing a physical Pen test, I would use this one or only a web app Pen test or whatever it might be. If I wanted to do multiple scopes in one report, then I would download the Multiscope template.

Let’s start by making a few changes to this report. First, our color codes. We all have our own branding and the color codes make it easy for us to get the colors on our branding exactly the way we want it to be. So you can go ahead and come in here and change any of these colors in this color code section, right? And I want to change our table header to our branded color right there. And then I want to change critical to this other purple color we use.

And then I want to go ahead we actually have our own colors of red, orange, blue, and green. So I’m going to go ahead and change all of those.

And you can do this by going to a website that makes you hex codes. If you color pick it out of a logo or if you have your branding guide like I do, you can go ahead and make those changes.

If I want my detailed findings to be a different color, I can do that as well. It’s actually already the color I want it to be because it’s the same color as the critical. You can see that number is the same. And then I could change the text colors of my severity text if I wanted to. I’m not going to go ahead and do that. I’m just going to leave them as is. One of the other options that people often do is change the COVID page.

So if we’re over here on the documentation, you can see exactly what we need to do to do that. And it’s just changed this number to reflect the number of the COVID page you want. We have nine options currently. The default is option seven, which that’s what that cover page looks like right there. I actually really like that cover page. So we’re going to leave it, but we’re going to scroll down in this report to that cover page because as we talked about, I have my own branding, and I want to make it look more like what I want. So I’m going to come in here and I’m going to change the color of my shape.

So we’re going to make that purple. Actually, I think I want to make it gray.

There we go. Yeah. And then I have a different logo because that’s what I have. I’m going to just right click on that logo and change the picture from a file. It’s going to pull up my files, and I downloaded a logo yesterday, and then we can adjust the sizes needed.

TADA now my logo is there, and all of this info will be completed based on the information that I enter into my report. So we are going to want to remember this information when we’re creating our report to make sure that we have all of that information available in that report. And that will come when we make our report template.

Those are the few changes I made. Obviously, there’s several more changes you can make, such as changing your summary table options, and you can view all of those in our documentation and see what the differences are, what our finding details might look like, if we want it to look like that, or if we want our detailed findings to look more like this. And those are all adjustments that you can make within your report. I actually really like option four, finding details, so detailed findings, option oh, look, the default is option four, so I don’t need to change anything because that was the one I liked the most. Here we’ll just change it, actually, so we can see that difference when we export this report. And now we’re going to move into the platform and I’m going to show you how this all comes together in addition with style guides to make your report look exactly the way you want it to. Now that we’ve got our report export template ready to go and saved, I am going to get started on setting up that information in PlexTrac.

We’re going to navigate to the account admin and then templates. And on here we have report templates, export templates, and style guides. And I’m going to head directly into style guides and create a new style guide.

So this is our newest feature, and currently it’s in beta mode. And it enables quick stylistic customizations that I can apply across different reports. So it saves style guides to streamline that report creation process and quickly apply design changes across your report exports with a few clicks, right? And up. And again, no coding required. And it enables me to deliver a customized experience to customers in a really scalable way without a heavy investment of time or resources to do so. So I’m going to change the way my code blocks appear. We’re going to keep the style as normal, but we’re going to enter in a prefix.

So every time there’s a code blocks, it will say object and then the information in the caption. And I’m going to change my font to Georgia.

And then I’m going to change my font size to twelve. And again, I’m going to change those colors.

Let me pull up my branding guide again, that one. And we’re going to make this font color our really dark, almost black color, but not quite black, right? Okay.

And then I can actually include a border as well to the code block. And that’s where I want my purple to come in.

And I can set the width. I want mine to be left aligned and the padding is fine in there. I’m also going to change the color of my hyperlink. And I want this to be our blue color.

It’s a really pretty teal.

Make it stand out a little bit on this report. And we’re going to create this style guide. Now we’re going to move over into export templates. And one thing to notice about this is it tells you exactly the order you should do it based on the order of the tabs. You start in style guides, you go back to export templates. We’re going to create that export template and download the one that I saved in there. And then I’m going to choose my style guide and I want it to be the report export template style guide I just made and upload.

And now this template is ready to go. And the final stop we’re going to make is the report template and we’re going to create a report template and we’re just going to name it what I’ve named everything else and I’m going to choose my export template. And remember on that cover page, we needed a few custom fields. We’re going to add those in right now because anytime I use this export template, I need to make sure those custom fields are in there. So we’re going to go over here and we’re just going to put that information in. We needed author, we needed author title, we needed author email.

We also needed company name and company address and company.

There may be additional custom fields that you want on this report, but these are the ones required for that cover page we chose. So we’re going to go ahead and just create this report template and now we’re going to go over to our clients and we’re going to create a report.

And for the purposes of this, I’m just going to name it exactly what we’ve been naming, everything else, and I’m going to choose my report export template as my report template. And in order for this to all show up correctly in that report, we need to complete that information.

If you don’t put this information in, it just says no value. And you would be able to go in and edit that information out at a later date if you wanted to when you export your report.

Okay, go ahead and submit that.

So now I have all that ready to go and I am going to go ahead and add in some findings.

This is going to be really quick because I just want to show you exactly what this would look like as it is exported. So I’m going to add all of my write ups in my write ups database, which is typically not something you would do, but we have it here. I need to add in some narrative sections as well so that my report has content.

We’re going to add in 14 sections.

Now that those narrative sections are in, I also went in and added the code block and the hyperlink so that we can be sure that those are included in our export. And we can see those adjustments we made in the style guides. We’re going to export this report as a Word document and we’re going to open this right up. It opened on my other screen. There we go. So you can see all of those changes I made, the background on the COVID page, the new logo, the information from those custom fields. If we scroll down, you can see that the code block has changed to the Georgia font in a size twelve.

And that hyperlink is the Teal color as well as the colors we changed on the severity levels and our detailed findings sections all look the way that we set in that report. And that is how you create totally customizable and personalized and branded reports using our very easy report export templates and style guide features to make quality reports with little time or effort.